NASA on Thursday introduced a crowdsourcing marketing campaign giving $20,000 to the particular person who will come up with the greatest structure for space bogs in advance of the agency’s 2024 flight to the moon.

The company issued its contact on HeroX, a system exactly where organizations can use crowdsourcing to discover “innovative solutions” to sophisticated difficulties.

While area toilets are previously in use at the Intercontinental Room Station (ISS), they are particularly made for microgravity, that means people and objects look to be weightless.

But a mission to the moon would need a exclusive style and design for the shuttle’s bogs to operate in lunar gravity, which is somewhere around 1-sixth of Earth’s gravity.

The style and design for the place bathroom ought to adhere to particular specifications. For instance, it should weigh much less than 33 pounds in Earth’s gravity, measure no a lot more than 4.23 cubic toes, consume considerably less than 70 watts of energy and accommodate equally sexes.

“While we might know how to make room bathrooms, we identify that there are a whole lot of innovations heading in waste administration from the no-flush bathroom to waterless bathrooms and much more,” said Mike Interbartolo of NASA’s Johnson Area Centre. “So we wanted to develop our information base by working with this problem to obtain the unknowns that may well be out there.”

“We are wanting forward to viewing what the crowdsourcing group can appear up with that is out-of-the-box and bring various perspectives for what is necessary for a rest room.”

The agency is offering a initially-, 2nd- and 3rd-spot prize for $20,000 $10,000 and $5,000, respectively. The submission deadline is Aug. 17 and the winner will be announced on Sept. 30.